We’re heading to the World Cup with Spain and learning Spanish!
Summer is here, and with it comes the eagerly awaited 2018 World Cup in Russia. As we know that our Spanish students love football and many of their countries are taking part in this tournament, here is an activity to help you explore different aspects of this much-loved sport with them.
On the one hand, we suggest reviewing the history of the World Cup using various images and videos available online, and organising a quiz with questions created by the students themselves in teams. This can be a great way to practise interrogative forms, past tenses and sports vocabulary, whilst learning about the history of the competition.
You could also include an activity where Spanish learners research the biography of their national team’s most famous footballer and give presentations on them to the whole class.
Finally, we suggest you commentate on a football match for a friend who hasn’t had the chance to watch it. The aim is to learn football vocabulary such as the actions that take place during a match, summarise a match using the simple past tense, and revise the use and the regular and irregular forms of that tense. If we have internet access in the classroom, we can show them a highlights reel of the match the students have chosen. After watching it, we ask them three general questions.
Who had more chances?
Was there a penalty?
Who scored the goals? Below, we provide a brief summary to help students deduce the actions that take place during a match. If there is no internet access, the text of the summary is provided directly.
After reading the text, we ask them to fill in a worksheet with the main events of the match. We then encourage them to draw up a list of the actions that occur in football matches.
To consolidate their vocabulary of football actions, we suggest a vocabulary exercise in which they must match actions with photographs, which they can use to write a match report. Finally, the main activity involves students describing the last football match they have watched to their classmates. As preparation, we first ask them to complete a worksheet and then to give an oral summary to their classmates. As homework, we can ask students to write a 150-word essay about a match taking place the following weekend that is broadcast on free-to-air television.
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